from-home in SW Louisiana. It’s not fancy, but scrupulously clean, and has a fully equipped kitchen and two refrigerators where we stash the tasso ham, and boudin and andouille sausages we buy in local butcher shops to bring home.
We stay at the Blue Moon because it’s one of the area’s best music venues – written up in the New York Times and Boston Globe among others. BeauSoleil – perhaps the best nationally-known Cajun group, who appeared last month at Springfield’s PAC – had their latest CD release party there on one of our recent stays. Our usual room juts out into the “saloon;” one wall – with boarded over windows – is the backdrop of the small stage. The music is loud, but it’s music we love; and if we go to bed early, we fall asleep listening to musicians just a few feet away.
But the young divers stay there because of two hostel rooms, which provide inexpensive lodging during their off-weeks. We’ve learned about life on the oil rigs from them – several weeks on the rigs, then a week or so off. They’ve talked about the food (good), the isolation and the inherent dangers of their job. As late as January, 2009, almost all their work involved repairs of damage caused by Hurricane Katrina in 2006.
I see the elderly man at Harvest Seafood in Erath where we buy coolers-full of shrimp and crabs to bring home after every visit. Actually, Harvest Seafood isn’t in Erath – it’s in the middle of nowhere. We first found it when we spied a faded sign with an arrow after losing our way along back roads surrounded by cane fields. Everything at Harvest shouts a hardscrabble existence: the long rutted driveway, the rusting mobile homes, the unkempt grounds, the wraith-like cats basking in the sun. But there’s a saying about fulfilling dreams hand-painted on the side of a wooden outbuilding. There’s an open shed with long rows of waist-high wooden trays filled with crabs of various sizes and circulating water where customers can choose their own crabs. The waisthigh trays make it easier to monitor when the crabs shed their hard carapaces and become the highly prized soft-shells – something that lasts only a few hours. We place an order to be picked up on our last day, and, if we’re lucky, score the biggest, most succulent soft-shell crabs I’ve ever had to take back to the Blue Moon for our dinner. The elderly man is usually the only one there; his children and grandchildren are on the boats. On our last visit, he was fretting about the expensive new walk-in cooler state regulations forced them to buy.
The tragic photos of doomed, oil-saturated animals – the turtles, the ducks, the pelicans that are clownishly awkward on land and elegantly graceful in the air and water – are more than I can bear. I quickly have to close my eyes. But when I do, I see those faces – the dancers and fishermen in Larose, the folks in the boiling points, the divers, the man at Harvest Seafood, and a host of others. And I feel like crying.
Contact Julianne Glatz at [email protected].
